Industrialized Landscapes

By Bernhard Debatin

The past 200 years have been a period of exponentially increasing interventions  into our natural environment. Monocultural farming, urbanization, and blacktop streets are the most visible aspect of it. Sprawling production sites is another one, often closely related to urbanization. Large areas for waste disposal are yet another related aspect. And, of course, landscapes of extraction: open pit mines, mountaintop removal mining sites, sludge ponds, waste tailings, and overburden disposal sites, to name the most obvious ones.

Fracking, too, is changing landscapes into industrialized extraction sites. Jonah Field in Western Wyoming is a good example for this new type of industrialized landscape.